there's no law against searching for infringing material.
At least not yet, you can bet the RIAA would love to be able to nail you for just *thinking* a copyrighted tune. I'm humming a metallica song right now, eat that lars!
A previous post suggests using tethers as an OMS, have you ever considered adding that to SNAP? It seems like a good solution to the fuel expense (read:satellite is useless when out of gas)problem, since there is no fuel to speak of, it can all be solar powered. Also, have you been contacted at all by any military type folks? seems like this would be a cheap anti-sat/ABM weapon. just my two cents ( if youre going to reply, just e-mail me at jstecher@hst.nasa.gov)
Reminds me of the simpsons episode where homer founds hypercompuglobalmeganet ( today it would be e-ihypercompuglobalmeganet) Then bill gates walks in and says "I cant find out what if anything your company does, but at the risk of competing with it, I've decided to buy you out" Then gates's hired goons trash the place. Probably whats happening at Bungie HQ right now.
probably more than 20 million, and it wouldnt matter if it wasnt, the SR-71 is about 5 times too slow to make orbit. Orbital velocity is mach 25 or so (at sea level), wheras the SR 71 has an official top speed of "somewhere above mach 3.5" and probably can get up to mach 5
As an aerospace engineer, I can assure you that the cases that plutonium batteries are encased in are as safe as humanly possible. You have a greater risk that russia will accidentally launch a nuke and have it kill you than to die from a plutonium battery. Given a choice, I would rather reenter the earths atmosphere in a plutonium battery case than in a soyuz capsule or the space shuttle ( after attaching some retrorockets and a parachute, theres only so many G's a guy can take, but for plutonium it doesnt matter all that much)
I disagree, I come from Minnesota, and up to about 3 weeks before the elections, Jesse Ventura was just as laughable a candidate as Ralph Nader (btw, nader is 2-3% above patty patty buke buke, with about 4-6% currently, the fact that you concede 10% is heartening)Remember, in a 3 way election, you only need 33.4% and with other semi viable candidates, that can go down even further. Nader is problbly the only presidential candidate who actually stands up for what he believes in. If your car has a 3 point seatbelt in it, thank ralph nader. If your life has ever been saved by an automobile safety device, thank Ralph Nader. He almost single handedly prodded the US government and the auto industry into putting in saftey equipment, and due to these actions has probably saved more lives than any american currently living. I didnt think Jesse would win in 98, but I "threw my vote away" because he was the candidate with the most integrity. I dont always agree with what he says and does, but at least I know where he stands, and I know he wont flip flop on the issues without a damn good reason. That and he thinks religion is the opiate of the people, which always gets my vote. So go out and vote for kang, or vote for kodos, but dont complain when either one enslaves you and takes over the earth. And be sure to have a board with a nail in it handy.
No, there is no solid proof yet for String Theory (hence the word "Theory" associated with these little stringy things, and not the word "Law" - isn't it cool how the English language allows you to make these distinctions?).
Actually you mean the string hypothesis. A "Theory" is a hypothesis that has evidence to back it up, however it is not absolute, i.e it is possible to disprove. A theorey does not necisarily have to have no evidence against it to still be called a theory, the theory of gravity being the most obvious example. Under certain relatavistic conditions, the theory of gravity as defined by newton breaks down completely. Also, to distinguish a theory from a law, a law is gaurenteed to work in all possible situations. Gravity is just a good idea, its not the law, nothing gaurentees that if you jump off a 20 story building youll fall down, however if you dont fall down, give me a call.
A hypothesis is an explanation for phenomena that has no evidence either supporting or negating it. I would beg to argue that string theory is a theory and not a hypothesis, if only because it works so well to explain the way things are. String theory is like a black box, you throw in numbers, and out come exactly the numbers you see by expirament. Unfortuneately we cant tell whats in the box through experiment, yet.
"Suppose we can get that(RAM memory storage time) up to several years," says Reed. "It would essentially be nonvolatile memory. Imagine how many times you wouldn't have to boot up Windows."
Actually the new screenless monitor will use a laser to paint the image of a screen directly on your retina, the laser will be mounted unobtrousively on sunglasses, and will be wireless and support eyeclick technology, in other words, clicking base on blinking or movements of the eye. but you didnt hear it from me, SJ will have my head!
Let this be a warning to all who think that Democrats (and PPI is centrist, "New" Democratic think tank) are better (or noticeably different) than Republicans or other politicians.
Why not try somone truly different, Ralph Nader is a champion of the little guy, and as far as I can tell, gets his jollies by breaking his foot off in corporate americas collective ass. Judge for yourself here
youre essentially correct about the less energy part, in fact it states that explicitly in the article you link to
To paraphrase a popular Pontiac automobile commercial tagline, "slower is better" in Ellis' view. His PowerBeam flywheel, operates at half the speed of the Oakridge device. Of course, this means it stores only a quarter of the energy, but it also produces only a quarter of the stress on the device's components.
As for the axis problem, counterrotinting does solve this, in the same way it solves the torsional problem when you spin the flywheels up. Say you have two flywheels, each rotating in opposite directions, and they are encased in a sturdy sheilding material. The angular momentum of flywheel A is X N*m/s along the k-hat direction, the angular momentum of flywheel B is -X N*m/s in the k-hat direction. If flywheel A is bolted securely to flywheel B, the net angular momentum of the system is the sum of flywheel A and flywheel B which is 0. Now, youre right that when you turn that forces will be generated, A and B will try to precess in opposite directions and tear themselves apart, but as long as you have your wheels cases bolted together well enough, and your magnetic bearings are strong enough, it shoudnt be a problem. also, if A doesnt have the same mass or rpm's as B, youll have turning problems too, but were assuming that the flywheels are identical and have the same rpms.
On the other hand, if you used gimbals, you could make one kick ass vehicle, that would be able to turn on a dime, you could replace the conventional front wheels with just one big roller, that could rotate freely, and use the gyroscopic efect to relace friction as the rotating mechanisim, but I digress.
Basically the first half of the wired article linked to above is with the guy in the discover article. If you read the wired article youll not that it mentions USFS was trying to get a deal with GM to manufacture the things and that it fell through,P>
It would be really cool to develop a mechanism to generate electricity using H20 and the chemical compunds found in air (Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Oxygen, etc.) on the spot.
This is completely impossible. First of all, your composition of air is way off, there is no hydrogen in air, as free hydrogen. Hydrogen reacts violently with air (remember the hindenburg?) to produce water, which is why we have so much water. In a larger sense, space wise, there is massively much more hydrogen than water or oxygen, mainly because the sun is made of hydrogen, fusion doesnt produce as much oxygen etc, but I digress). Everything in the atmosphere is at a low energy state except for trace amounts of methane due to life, but thats an anomoly and not the rule. It is physically impossible to have an energetic reaction using common atmospheric elements, if it were possible then we would be screwed, because it would very quickly occur, all the energy would be released, and we would be fried to a crisp.
An Air/Water Cell is the next logical step.
You are implying then that some catalyist can be found to allow the reaction to proceed, but there has to be a possibl reaction first, and there is no possible reaction between air and water. All a catalyist does is lower the temperature that the reaction occurs at. In a conventional fuel cell, platinum allows hydrogen to be combined with oxygen without a giant fireball. If there were such a high temperature reaction, various above ground nuclear tests would have set it off. In fact, various scientists at the manhattan project were worried about this reaction occuring, i.e that the nitrogen in the air would combine exothermally with the oxygen and produce enough heat to sustain the reaction, and thus making the earth an oven. Lucky for us, it didnt happen, but it also empirically proved that there can be NO reaction between atmospheric constituants that is exothermal.
The best way to avoid this problem, and i believe the way the specify in the article, is not gimballing, which requires extra equipment, complexity and cost, but to simply install another flywheel rotating in the opposite direction, so that the forces created by turning one flywheel are equal and opposite to the forces generated by turning the other flywheel. Yes, this requires two flywheels, but any flywheel powered car would require many flywheels, so this shouldnt be a problem, you just have to install an even number.
Ive read the article you link to, and It says nothing about multiprocessing. The future of computers is not necesarily faster individual chips, but more of them. How many supercomputers run on a single chip? Apple is in a perfect position to exploit the MP market. At WWDC they did a demo with a prototype two processor job, and got something like 95 % increase in speed over a single processor, the best intel can do is a 75% inclrease, and how optimised is windows for MP anyways? OS X is practically designed for MP, as well as for altivec enhancement (mmmmmm 128 bit wide data paths ) Ultimately in the speed wars, Apple can throw more processors at it, and get a bigger improvement than intel can throwing the same amount of processors at a task. Not to mention that PPC chips are incredible power efficient compared to intel, hell the imac doesnt even need a fan for cooling! Try doing that with your PIII behemoth.
I think that there has been too much hype lately bout "the end of the boom" The economy is doing great, and as any buisness sector grows and matures, companies start to fall out and go bankrupt. How many software companies from 1980 are still in buisness? ( hint: the government is trying to split them up for being a little too successful). In 20 years I gurentee that 90% of the e-commerrce sites around today will be either bankrupt or bought out by AOL. This does not mean its the end of the world by any means. Humans, and americans in particular, seem to need a doomsday scenario hanging over their heads at all times, first it was communisim, then the nazis, then communism again, then asteroids for a few years, then y2k, and now the impending economic collapse of society. Nothing bad will happen.
Yes, please do stop with all those nasty mac stories, they remind me that my OS doesnt have as nice a front end as I might like. You do of course realize that people have been predicting apples demie almost since it was started. Lisa would be apples doom, the Mac would kill Apple, Apples draining market share would kill it, the lack of a modern OS will destroy apple, the iMac would finish off Apple. So you can understant my skepticism about you crying wolf about their demise. Ill believe Apple is dead when they close their offices at 1 infinite loop.
It is time someone popped the bubble of your faux intelligencia.
Are you implying that everyone has the same intelligence? If so, you are sorely mistaken, and if not, then there is no bubble to pop, since some people must be smarter than others, and therefore constitue an "intelligencia"
1. You can make a reference to a couple metrics(IQ and SAT scores), invalidate them, and then vaguely use them out of their basic context(scholastic performance prediction.) This is invalid. BTW...the average score is SUPPOSED to be 900. If its not, the curve is off.
IQ is more of a measure of ability to learn rather than specifically a prediction of future scholastic performance. And granted, even barring that, I could see how both metrics would be interpreted as such, regardless, the ability to do well in school is a sign of inteligence. If you are just plain dumb, you probably wont do too geat in school, and your IQ and SAT scores would reflect this, and thus your general intelligence, I fail to see your point.
2. If you were as intelligent as you assumed yourself to be, you wouldn't have put (sp?) next to a simple word like choir. Who's in the middle of the SAT pool?
You assumed that I was smart, I made no such assumption, I freely admit that I can and will make mistakes, such as the spelling of Choir. I assume that since you point this out youve never made a spelling error in your entire life.
3. It doesn't take a genius, or even a relatively bright person(ibid) to read slashdot. It is a website. It does not use an extraordinary level of complex grammar or concepts.
This is true, but only if youve been in the computer industry for several years, or are an avid computer geek, some of the following words and acronyms found on todays main page: GPL, GNOME, BSD, Linux, domain name registy, Self Timed ARM provides low power consumption. Ask Joe Six pack on the street what any of those things means and youll get a big HUH? So dont tell me that slashdot doesnt have complex concepts or confusing words to the average american.
4. It is truly entertaining that such an individualist such as yourself uses a report from ABC as evidence of the general populace's opinion, and thus ignorance. Furthermore, there are plenty of intelligent people who see the break up of Microsoft as treating a symptom and placating the currently irritated.
who would you rather I quoted from? the Cato Institute? Theyre against the breakup too. ABC is perfectly capable of performing a survey. Also, just because somone is intelligent, doesnt mean that theyre "awake" as Katz puts it.
I think you are overestimating the ability of the average american to "wake up" as you put it to corporate intrests and puppeteering. The "average" American after all, has an IQ of 100 and would score 1000 on the SAT, biased means of measuring intelligence, true, but useful nonetheless. In other words, by definition, half of all americans are below these measures of knowledge and intelligence. Posting here gives you the advantage of preaching to the choir (sp?) since I would argue that you would need to be of significantly above average intelligence to read and undestand/. I would contend however, that the average american is nearly oblivious to the corporate manipulations that he or she undergo on a daily basis. After all, a recent survey at ABC news put the number of americans who are against the breaking up of Microsoft at near 70%. So not only are most americans not cognizent of the manipulation they are undergoing, a large portion of them are incapable of waking up to that fact, even when faced with hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Megacorporation. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but in general this holds
If in 10 years time, computer users labour under draconian restrictions on communications software under what is titled the Lars Ulrich Digital Copy Enforcement Act
Actually, its the Lars Ulrich Digital Document Internet Transmission Enactment or LUDDITE for short
Slashdot Mirror
At least not yet, you can bet the RIAA would love to be able to nail you for just *thinking* a copyrighted tune. I'm humming a metallica song right now, eat that lars!
Actually you mean the string hypothesis. A "Theory" is a hypothesis that has evidence to back it up, however it is not absolute, i.e it is possible to disprove. A theorey does not necisarily have to have no evidence against it to still be called a theory, the theory of gravity being the most obvious example. Under certain relatavistic conditions, the theory of gravity as defined by newton breaks down completely. Also, to distinguish a theory from a law, a law is gaurenteed to work in all possible situations. Gravity is just a good idea, its not the law, nothing gaurentees that if you jump off a 20 story building youll fall down, however if you dont fall down, give me a call.
A hypothesis is an explanation for phenomena that has no evidence either supporting or negating it. I would beg to argue that string theory is a theory and not a hypothesis, if only because it works so well to explain the way things are. String theory is like a black box, you throw in numbers, and out come exactly the numbers you see by expirament. Unfortuneately we cant tell whats in the box through experiment, yet.
Millions of times probably
Why not try somone truly different, Ralph Nader is a champion of the little guy, and as far as I can tell, gets his jollies by breaking his foot off in corporate americas collective ass. Judge for yourself here
To paraphrase a popular Pontiac automobile commercial tagline, "slower is better" in Ellis' view. His PowerBeam flywheel, operates at half the speed of the Oakridge device. Of course, this means it stores only a quarter of the energy, but it also produces only a quarter of the stress on the device's components.
As for the axis problem, counterrotinting does solve this, in the same way it solves the torsional problem when you spin the flywheels up. Say you have two flywheels, each rotating in opposite directions, and they are encased in a sturdy sheilding material. The angular momentum of flywheel A is X N*m/s along the k-hat direction, the angular momentum of flywheel B is -X N*m/s in the k-hat direction. If flywheel A is bolted securely to flywheel B, the net angular momentum of the system is the sum of flywheel A and flywheel B which is 0. Now, youre right that when you turn that forces will be generated, A and B will try to precess in opposite directions and tear themselves apart, but as long as you have your wheels cases bolted together well enough, and your magnetic bearings are strong enough, it shoudnt be a problem. also, if A doesnt have the same mass or rpm's as B, youll have turning problems too, but were assuming that the flywheels are identical and have the same rpms.
On the other hand, if you used gimbals, you could make one kick ass vehicle, that would be able to turn on a dime, you could replace the conventional front wheels with just one big roller, that could rotate freely, and use the gyroscopic efect to relace friction as the rotating mechanisim, but I digress.
Basically the first half of the wired article linked to above is with the guy in the discover article. If you read the wired article youll not that it mentions USFS was trying to get a deal with GM to manufacture the things and that it fell through,P>
This is completely impossible. First of all, your composition of air is way off, there is no hydrogen in air, as free hydrogen. Hydrogen reacts violently with air (remember the hindenburg?) to produce water, which is why we have so much water. In a larger sense, space wise, there is massively much more hydrogen than water or oxygen, mainly because the sun is made of hydrogen, fusion doesnt produce as much oxygen etc, but I digress). Everything in the atmosphere is at a low energy state except for trace amounts of methane due to life, but thats an anomoly and not the rule. It is physically impossible to have an energetic reaction using common atmospheric elements, if it were possible then we would be screwed, because it would very quickly occur, all the energy would be released, and we would be fried to a crisp.
An Air/Water Cell is the next logical step.
You are implying then that some catalyist can be found to allow the reaction to proceed, but there has to be a possibl reaction first, and there is no possible reaction between air and water. All a catalyist does is lower the temperature that the reaction occurs at. In a conventional fuel cell, platinum allows hydrogen to be combined with oxygen without a giant fireball. If there were such a high temperature reaction, various above ground nuclear tests would have set it off. In fact, various scientists at the manhattan project were worried about this reaction occuring, i.e that the nitrogen in the air would combine exothermally with the oxygen and produce enough heat to sustain the reaction, and thus making the earth an oven. Lucky for us, it didnt happen, but it also empirically proved that there can be NO reaction between atmospheric constituants that is exothermal.
Are you implying that everyone has the same intelligence? If so, you are sorely mistaken, and if not, then there is no bubble to pop, since some people must be smarter than others, and therefore constitue an "intelligencia"
1. You can make a reference to a couple metrics(IQ and SAT scores), invalidate them, and then vaguely use them out of their basic context(scholastic performance prediction.) This is invalid. BTW...the average score is SUPPOSED to be 900. If its not, the curve is off.
IQ is more of a measure of ability to learn rather than specifically a prediction of future scholastic performance. And granted, even barring that, I could see how both metrics would be interpreted as such, regardless, the ability to do well in school is a sign of inteligence. If you are just plain dumb, you probably wont do too geat in school, and your IQ and SAT scores would reflect this, and thus your general intelligence, I fail to see your point.
2. If you were as intelligent as you assumed yourself to be, you wouldn't have put (sp?) next to a simple word like choir. Who's in the middle of the SAT pool?
You assumed that I was smart, I made no such assumption, I freely admit that I can and will make mistakes, such as the spelling of Choir. I assume that since you point this out youve never made a spelling error in your entire life.
3. It doesn't take a genius, or even a relatively bright person(ibid) to read slashdot. It is a website. It does not use an extraordinary level of complex grammar or concepts.
This is true, but only if youve been in the computer industry for several years, or are an avid computer geek, some of the following words and acronyms found on todays main page: GPL, GNOME, BSD, Linux, domain name registy, Self Timed ARM provides low power consumption. Ask Joe Six pack on the street what any of those things means and youll get a big HUH? So dont tell me that slashdot doesnt have complex concepts or confusing words to the average american.
4. It is truly entertaining that such an individualist such as yourself uses a report from ABC as evidence of the general populace's opinion, and thus ignorance. Furthermore, there are plenty of intelligent people who see the break up of Microsoft as treating a symptom and placating the currently irritated.
who would you rather I quoted from? the Cato Institute? Theyre against the breakup too. ABC is perfectly capable of performing a survey. Also, just because somone is intelligent, doesnt mean that theyre "awake" as Katz puts it.
I think you are overestimating the ability of the average american to "wake up" as you put it to corporate intrests and puppeteering. The "average" American after all, has an IQ of 100 and would score 1000 on the SAT, biased means of measuring intelligence, true, but useful nonetheless. In other words, by definition, half of all americans are below these measures of knowledge and intelligence. Posting here gives you the advantage of preaching to the choir (sp?) since I would argue that you would need to be of significantly above average intelligence to read and undestand /. I would contend however, that the average american is nearly oblivious to the corporate manipulations that he or she undergo on a daily basis. After all, a recent survey at ABC news put the number of americans who are against the breaking up of Microsoft at near 70%. So not only are most americans not cognizent of the manipulation they are undergoing, a large portion of them are incapable of waking up to that fact, even when faced with hard evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Megacorporation. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but in general this holds
"I'm Not!"
I forget where that quote comes from, the buddy bears I think
Actually, its the Lars Ulrich Digital Document Internet Transmission Enactment or LUDDITE for short